I didn’t have a chance to test out the newest Reaper of Souls beta patch Thursday evening when it went live, but I made up for it over the weekend, assisted by a once-in-a-decade level of snow accumulation that was more than enough to all-but-immobilize the roads around here, which are slow-and-go at best, choked as they are with always-tentative Oregon drivers. (I never miss California more than when I’m trying to make good time on any Portland area freeway, rain or shine.)

That said, it was a good weekend to be snowed in, since the new Diablo 3 patch is awesome. Playing the last few days was a blast, as good or better than any play time since Diablo 3’s release, and that’s even with the handicap of playing on the test realm, where I know everything I find and every level I gain is going to be erased sometime shortly before March 25th. I was as skeptical as the show guests (see note for 1:11:11) just a couple of weeks ago, but Reaper of Souls really is rounding into form.

The drop rates are good, the legendary items are fun, bounties and side events and Cursed Chests and Nephalem Rifts provide a huge variety of things to do in the game (if only PvP!), the exp gain rates are great (too generous, if anything), the benefits to playing multiplayer are solid, most of the classes are well-balanced and allow for a variety of builds and play styles, The patch optimized all of those things and added in quite a few layers and nuances as well. So let’s get into some details, starting with…

Bounties and Nephalem Rifts

The heart of Reaper of Souls’ play experience is Adventure Mode, with Bounties and Nephalem Rifts providing the bulk of the play, and doing so with a great deal more variety than anything seen previously in a Diablo title. These features have been in Reaper of Souls since the beta started and they work much the same now as back in November (or Blizzcon in October) but Blizzard’s infamous iteration is very evident in just how these game features have been tweaked and improved and rebalanced over time. Bounties and Rifts are now quick and easy to get into, roughly-equivalent in overall rewards, and they are a lot of fun. They’re certainly more enjoyable than anything in Story Mode, to the point that I don’t know anyone with RoS beta access who can stand to play the live game now. It just feels so boring and repetitious, compared to the much improved RoS version.

Cursed Chests are fun bounties.

A perfect example of iteration during the beta is the rewards structure for Bounties. They started off very exploitable but fairly dull; most Bounties were a single Purple boss to kill which meant players would hit the nearest waypoint and then dash through the level, looking for the orange ping on the map. Once found the Purple was slaughtered, the player popped back to town, and another bounty was lined up. That basic mode was soon supplemented with a requirement that you kill 40 or 50 enemies on the Bounty’s level, which did a bit to slow the exploiting, but not enough. It was a lame one-size-fits-all feature too; you couldn’t help but kill 50 (or 250) on your way to a Bounty in a level like the Keep 2, while bounties in some other areas were much harder to complete.

Months ago Elly and I wound up running back around the edges of the entire spiral staircase in one of the Cursed Tower levels in Act Three, as we tried to lure up a few more ghouls when we’d cleared the whole level and were only at 34/40 on our kill counter. More recently I was in a three player game with a bounty the Act One cemetery, but not enough skeletons spawned (we should have left some of the Skeleton Mages alive long enough to call up a few more bone dudes). We were at like 38/50, but rather than giving up the Bounty we improvised and used ourselves as bait to lure zombies in from the Weeping Hollow, since killing them in the Cemetery counted towards the 50 required for the bounty. (Zombies don’t walk so fast, you notice?)

This new patch shakes all that up. Not only are the bugs and broken bounties all fixed (crossed fingers), but bounties vary in value with the more difficult or time consuming ones giving much larger rewards. (I have some issues with the point allocation, but later for that.) There are many more types of bounties now, with more variety in them. I saw several Purples I hadn’t seen before as Bounty targets, or ever seen at all, and the inclusion of Cursed Chests (Horde or Wave types) as bounty goals has brought a lot more potential levels and areas and sub-dungeons into the pool of potential bounty zones. I actually got one in one of the Act Four dungeons, which was the first time anyone had intentionally entered one of those levels since what, like July 2012?

Click through for lots more screenshots, plus a bit more on bounties, and then coverage of Nephalem Rifts, Pools of Reflection (AKA Survival Bonuses), all the new legendary materials, interesting developments in Crafting and Enchanting, the new Hellfire Ring proc effect, and much more.

Bounty Rewards

Bounties vary widely in requirements and rewards now, and those changes made the system a lot more fun. There are still some issues though, and I won’t be surprised if these get iterated as well, between now and release. Hell, between now and next week, as quickly as the patches are coming of late.

Bounty rewards for Gold and EXP scale up between the difficulty levels, and the progression seems pretty smooth. The amount of Blood Shards and Rift Keystone Fragments does not scale up as mathematically, since those are awarded in small amounts with some randomized variance (1-4 BS for most bounties) or are set values (1 Rift part per bounty). The following figures are the rewards for Torment difficulty, just since that’s what I played the most of and took notes/screenshots of the values.

The basic easiest bounties are the ones with a single monster target and no kill counter. These award 18,800 gold and 2.9 million experience upon completion. Examples of these include all Act Bosses and special sub-bosses, such as Siegebreaker, Cydaea, the Skeleton King, Izual, etc. This reward level also includes some Purples on larger levels with 50 counters, such as the Aspects of Pain or Destruction in Act Four.

Bounty bag and EXP/gold reward from Tyrael.

The medium level of bounty has one Purple target and requires 100 kills on a larger level. I got this type in the Weeping Hollow and Rakkis Crossing. It awards 37,800 gold and 5.8m exp.

The biggest bounties task you to find a Purple on a very large level with a 150 counter, or else they are “clear a dungeon level” which is always the not-very-big second level in some dungeon. These are worth 99,420 gold and 15,428,000 exp, 4 shards, 1 rift keystone fragment.

Finishing all five bounties in a given act on Torment yields you a Horadric goodie bag plus an additional 5.8m exp and 28k gold.

There’s a bit more variety than that; I got one level with a 75 counter and sometimes you get like 57k gold instead of 38k, but I haven’t done them enough to know every permutation yet. The bigger issue, IMHO, is that these rewards aren’t fair, in terms of time to complete. The Act Boss and sub-boss bounties are usually pretty slow, just since you have to run through an entire level or two on the way. Sometimes you find it quickly, but usually those take as long or longer than the “hard” bounties.

The easiest, in time vs. reward, are some of the “clear a dungeon level” bounties. Some of these are long and slow to find, like level two of some Act Two desert dungeons, since you have to run and run to find the dungeon, then run through it to find level two. Some of them are absurdly easy though, with probably the quickest two in the entire game the two small crypts in the Festering Woods. Both can show up as bounties, each can be reached in 15 seconds from the waypoint, and each has only some easily-killed skeletons within. The long narrow one (Warrior’s Rest, IIRC) is just ridic, where the 15.8m reward works out to about 1.2m per skeleton.

Ironically, the worst ones are the mediums. When I enter an area and see the 100 counter I moan and wail, since it’s always a medium-sized levels without much monster density and usually a lot of time spent traveling rather than fighting. The Pademonium Level 1 and 2 are special unfavorites here, since they are usually the worst levels in Nephalem Rifts as well. Very low monster density, lots of long narrow pathways, dead ends galore, etc.

That ties into the other biggest issue with Bounty values… Act Five. I won’t belabor the point, but if you’re playing for rewards over time and you start a new game and see that one of your double bounty options is Act Five, you’re probably going to be starting a new game after just one Act of Bounties.

Act Five areas are very well designed, they’ve got awesome monsters, and there is still some novelty in doing them, but the layouts are just death on Bounties. All of Act Five’s areas are enormous and slow to search, or huge spread-out mazes, or large and winding catacombs like the Act Three keep, or big and elongated and full of dead ends. There are a few quick/fun/easy bounties in Act Five, but most of them mandate a lot of exploration, and their rewards are far from commensurate with the time required. I don’t think redesigning the act for Bounties is in the cards, so maybe just doubling the value of all Act Five bounties (so they’d be quadruple when bonus’ed?) would be better than nothing.

Difficulty Levels

After showing 0% bonus for the past two patches, the display values for the gold/exp increase per difficulty levels are back. And for the first time Torment 2-6 shows values, scaling up impressively.

Previously there was tooltip text about special legendaries and crafting plans only dropping on Torment and above, but it’s not there anymore. Blue has said there are Torment-only legs, though. Speaking of tooltip lies… Imperial gems. I’ve found hundreds of gems in Torment 1 and Torment 2 in the last two patches, and not once have I found anything but Marquise gems.

The Imperial is a lie.

Pool of Reflection

Pools of Reflection were added in the previous patch, but are much better explained in the game now than they were previously. They are found where health pools spawn, and maybe 1/10th of them is now a Pool of Reflection.

They look yellow, but unlike yellow snow they are good to drink, as they grant a 25% experience gain bonus. The interesting wrinkle is that they can stack up to 10 times, with each additional PoR increasing how much more experience you can gain before the 25% bonus expires.

You can see the display in the thumb here. The “Bonus pool remaining” numbers now seen in the game are wrong, I think, but the concept is sound. Just for example, say you need 200m for your current Paragon level, and you get a PoR early on. It will grant you the 25% bonus for something like the next 40m experience you find. If you don’t die over that time, and don’t find another PoR, once you’ve gained the 40m exp it will be consumed and your 25% bonus goes away. If you do find more PoRs the size of the Bonus Pool Remaining will be increased.

You now get a visual on your exp bar, with an orange dot marking how far you can advance the exp with your current allowed PoR bonus. If the bonus extends beyond the current Paragon level the little orange dot shows at the far right of the bar, and then goes to the right place on the bar once you ding and the slider resets to empty.

PoR Survivalism

The Blues haven’t billed them as such, but PoRs are essentially providing a survival bonus, which is something many fans have suggested for years. (As opposed to just death penalties.) PoRs only grant a bonus to experience gain, but it’s a substantial bonus, and it resets if you die.

I think it would be more fun if there were ultra-rare orange PoRs that granted Magic Find or Gold Find bonus as well, or perhaps when you got more than 5 stacks you’d start to get a GF/MF bonus on top of the EXP?

This could be exploited, I guess. Players might go down to easier difficulty levels to avoid dying. They could even go down to Normal and just run through areas trying to get up higher stacks of PoR to trigger the hypothetical MF/GF bonus on top of the EXP. But given the way the higher levels of Torment scale up in exp and gold rewards, jumping FAR more than 25% per level, I don’t think low level PoR hording would be a real big deal.

If you’re wondering, you don’t see how many stacks you have in the game. (That would be interesting, as the number would decrease as you leveled up and steadily depleted the remaining bonus pool.) Also, these pools aren’t super rare, but they’re not that common either. I’ll occasionally find 2 or 3 in a level or two, but with the crazy rate of exp gain in the new patch, I’ve actually had trouble finding enough PoRs to even keep my bonus pool from expiring between them. They could be a lot more common without being too common, and they way they are now you really regret it if you’re careless and die when you had a good half level or more of PoR bonus still loaded up.

That fairly scarce rate of discovery makes me think they won’t be a big deal or difference for Hardcore. Obviously players there won’t be expiring them as often, but it’s not like you find 10 a game and only reset the bonus if you die. On Torment I usually exp out of mine before I find another one to add to the pool.

Also, I assume skills like Near Death Experience and Spirit Vessel will not reset the PoR since they work before death. There are a few new legendaries that have a resurrection proc, but those only trigger when a character actually does die, not just drops below 10% hps, so in theory those would not preserve Pool of Reflection bonuses. Though it if did that could be an interesting wrinkle and some reason for softcore character to care about those items.

Legendary Crafting Materials

One pleasant surprise in the new patch was all new graphics for all of the legendary materials. These had a grab bag of graphics earlier in the beta, before all turned to pink “No icon” squares in the last patch. Now they’re all good though, with pretty new graphics. Really “new” graphics; even the few that had what seemed like proper graphics a couple of patches ago have new graphics now.

The main result of this was that many RoS players who had been collecting them opened their stash expecting to see the usual pink screen of bleh, and instead got an explosion in a pawn shop. I had 23 of the leg mats in my stash before the patch, and you can see them in the screen to the right. They are three wide down the left side of the stash, then turning to the side just above the gems. All the other mats to the top right are non-legendary materials mostly obtained from salvaging, and virtually all of them are found in vast quantities. (Though this patch mercifully turned down the drop rates of the comically-overabundant Deaths Breaths.)

The full list of the mats, and the types of purples that drop them, can be seen in this great thread in our community forum. It was even updated this weekend with info on the newly-added leg mats in this patch.

And yes, they’re now gold when they drop. They do not put a star on the map though, the way legendary items and legendary crafting plans do.

Crafting materials, once again properly orange.

You want to see them all, don’t you? With their names and hover descriptions and flavor text? Okay, fine. I took screens of them all for the wiki anyway.

Legendary and Set Crafting Plans

Just briefly, these are now *much* more common drops. I’d only found a single one during the “no legs for you” patch we suffered through all January, and that was after finding them like candy earlier in the beta. They’re not candy again, but the do drop pretty regularly. And they look awesome, especially then green set ones. Like legendary items, they *CLANG* and put a star on the map, plus the beam of light into the sky. It looks best in a dark area, though I’ll understand if you don’t actually try to concentrate your monster killing in those areas to maximize the chances of the pretty glowing dark drop.

Also, Blue hasn’t confirmed this but I think they might be a sort of smart drop now. Since these plans are all BoA, and can’t even be traded or given to others in the same game when you find them, there’s zero reason to ever find the same plan twice. (This is stupid, IMHO. They should be tradeable like other legs, in the same game they are found.)

At any rate, I’ve found 8 or 10 crafting plans in the new patch and none have been duplicates. I haven’t seen any jeweler plans drop in a month+ in the beta, since I’ve already found all of them for the higher levels of gems. (Though I did find duplicate crafting plans weeks ago, even when I was not finding any duplicate gem plans, so maybe my no-dupes crafting plans this weekend was just RNG.)

While we’re here, how about a legendary crafting effort? Here’s some shoulders I made for my Demon Hunter. Nothing amazing, but they did roll an upgrade over her rare. The recipe was just 6 random affixes, nothing guaranteed at all, and no legendary powers either. This is true of a lot of of the legendary crafting recipes now; they’re basically just potentially really good rares. A bit better than that since their stats will roll higher than rares can, as you can see on the shoulder comparison, but they aren’t like many of the found legendaries, which can have those special orange stings that do special orange things.

Legendary crafting uses those odd legendary materials you saw above, and some of the better recipes now require a Flawless Royal gem (which costs 9.8m and 27 Marquise to make). Not all of them, thankfully. Here’s a quiver I’m trying to make for my Demon Hunter, and like all the legendary crafting it requires a white version of the item as part of the raw materials.

This is problematic since I don’t think I’ve ever seen a white quiver. I’ve got a pretty good collection of white weapons and armors, most of them found from weapon/armor racks, but quivers? Off hand white items are not something I can remember many examples of.

That’s too bad since the quiver has some interesting inherent properties, and I’m curious to see how it would work out. Would the added CC stack with a random roll of Critical hit Chance, potentially giving you up to 12% on the quiver?

Speaking of Quivers, here’s my pet peeve. Legendary quivers that don’t have CC as an inherent property. I’ve found 2 so far in the new patch, both while playing my fairly kick ass DH, and neither had CC. That’s what enchanting is for though, right? Well… not so much with quivers. Since those items can roll with a bonus to almost every single Demon Hunter skill, the field of properties is just insane. Which means the odds of getting Critical hit Chance, which is basically essential for a quiver, is terrible. And since they’re legendary, each roll costs a Forgotten Soul, and then things don’t grow on trees. (Just Rift Guardians.)

To be fair, your odds of CC are much better if you roll something other than the skill bonus. Since the Quiver can only have one skill bonus, all those affixes will leave the pool, and you’ll only have 6 or 8 possible rolls, instead of 30ish. But that assumes you actually get a bonus to one of the skills you are going to use, and with a decent % damage, in the first place. Good luck with that.

I don’t say that every legendary Quiver should have guaranteed 8-10% CC (even though pretty much every leg mojo and orb does), but at least 4-10% or something like that, given that CC is basically mandatory on a quiver for quality end game gear.

Enchanting Efforts

Enchanting is cheaper and the display of possible affixes seems to be bug-free. As Blue said pre-patch you can’t enchant any legacy items anymore, and that includes (just now during the beta) everything found before this patch. Thus it’s odd to visit the Mystic now, since all your gear, unless new-found, is sort of grayed out when you’re at the Enchanting interface.

That aside, players who aren’t in the RoS beta often ask how enchanting works, how much it costs, and what affixes are worth enchanting. Here’s a brief two-shot tutorial, starring a new pair of green boots for my Demon Hunter.

In almost every instance, you want to enchant one of the primary stats. You might one day find an item with an almost perfect seed, with all the affixes you want with great rolls on each. I’ve never done so thus far, but it’s possible. In that case you might want to roll a secondary stat, though about the best you’ll ever do there is to add 2y of pickup radius, or perhaps change a single resistance; cold to physical, or something like that. (But only on an item that didn’t roll ResAll, since you can never have that with a single res anymore.)

I’d question if that was even worth the enchant, too. Obviously it would have some value, but usually you’d be better off rolling your mainstat or vit to add another 40 or 50 points, since you’d get more benefit from that than from any secondary stat. And even then probably only on a Rare, since that only costs gold. (And much lower gold costs in the new patch.) Enchanting anything on a Legendary item, even a secondary affix, costs a Forgotten Soul.

All that said, you’ll usually be enchanting an item with 3 or 4 (or very rarely 5) primary stats, and there it’s a question of what you want more. Enchanting is much more difficult and complicated on jewelry and gloves since those items have dozens of primary stats. Armor and weapons are a lot simpler. Usually there are 4 or 5 other primary stats, plus another 4-7 possible skill bonuses. (Which skills you can get in bonus vary by item type, and the classes are divided up so you can only get a bonus to the same skill on 1 or 2 items.)

That’s what you see with these Natalya’s Boots. They rolled with Dex, Res All, Armor, and Movement Speed. Dropping movement speed is a real option in RoS since you can add it via Paragon points, and any account with at least 197 paragon points could reach the 25% MS bonus entirely via Paragon points. (MS is in the Core tab now, along with mainstat, vit, and +max resource.)

That said, these are for a Demon Hunter where Armor is not real important, so that’s what I chose to remove. You see in the screenshot the other potentials for that slot. It took me 3 tries, but I hit the jackpot and got +14% Rapid Fire, which was probably what I most wanted for my current build, and even with a good % bonus on it. I’d have settled for Vitality or Regen also, as upgrades from Armor.

Nephalem Rift Guardian Buffs

I wrote a long and extensively-illustrated article about Nephalem Rifts last week. It covered all sorts of details about how rifts work and what they’re good for, with a lot of pros and cons vs. Bounties. I didn’t post it yet since the patch was coming, and when it came it completely redid all the values for Rifts vs. Bounties. So I’ll have to rework that part of the article once I’ve played enough to get a sense of the new economics.

In the meantime, on top of Rift Guardians getting big buffs to their drop rates… they got new toys. Toys to kill you with.

They do not have enrage timers, but they do have new and very dangerous talents. The ones that could summon were summoning a variety of minions, and far more quickly than before. The ones that could cast spells were doing more spells and more quickly, and especially during the last 1/4 or so of their hit points.

Here’s Blighter and Rime showing off new talents I’d never seen before this patch. Others probably have other new tricks as well, though my research has not yet brought me into contact with them.

Other New Stuff

I had a lot more in my notes, but this has gone long enough.

One last thing briefly is the coolness of more variety and shuffling of monster types, especially in special appearance by purples. Entirely new purples, or else purples that didn’t used to be in Area X.

One example I remember was a purple Unburied as the Bounty target in the Weeping Hollow, where never before did such enemies reside.

One that actually got me to hoot with surprise was doing a “clear level” bounty. It was level two of one of the Act One caves, and I’d done all but one enemy on the level. While running to the last corner of the level, and expecting just another scavenger or bat, I got to the dead end… and a purple tunnel worm popped out of the ground, and ate me in a single bite!

Okay, it didn’t actually do that, but it was there and it was purple and glorious. I had never seen any tunnel worms elsewhere in that area, and I wasn’t doing a Rift, where weird monster combos are the rule. This was just a cool surprise, and the fact that it was the last monster for that entire Bounty made it all the cooler.

It’s nice when a game you know quite well hits you with cool stuff, and I think it’s going to be very cool when Reaper of Souls launches. Not just for the lucky few beta testers who can start finding gear and earning experience for real, but for the vast majority of fans who are not in the beta and have never seen a bounty or a rift except in a YouTube video. They’re really cool. Really fun. More now than before. You will freak, used as you are to the slow and predictable game play of Story Mode as you see it in the live game today. Six weeks and counting!

Flux … what’s the deal? Is Blizzard paying you directly to compliment the game now? Did you have a bill to pay or something? Because, I’m STILL ticked off about the changes they’ve made and the promises they’ve broken.

Don’t you represent the players?

How can you not point out the fact that are punishing long time players of the game. That all that we’ve spent time building is lost in the new patch; rendered useless and now we can’t modify a single thing?

You ever notice that people only accuse Flux of being paid off by Blizzard when he makes a positive post (because D3 is the worst thing ever and playing it is like having your thumbs twisted off), but when he makes negative or iffy remarks no one ever accuses him of being paid off by GGG or something similar? What’s the deal?

Also, I think Flux does a great job of representing me, even though I’ve never directly talked to him. I don’t feel punished by an expansion coming out and Blizzard can do whatever they want to try and deliver an engaging expansion experience. If it looks like they’re succeeding, I’ll buy RoS; otherwise, I won’t.

They are succeeding to sell the game for sure, but the game is still not complete!

They really made all the people forget about PvP because they sell the next expansion with this feature. All Blizzard is doing now is good marketing nothing else.

They know we all love this game and teasing us with content what should be in game from the beginning.

I would also buy this game probably later if I get a discount, but will wait for the comments and feedback after release and probably will not stay in line at 12 o`clock in the night at release day to get error #37 all night long when I try to log-in.

Anyways Blizzard have not convinced me yet, the changes and content still not made this game perfect yet 🙁

To be fair longtime players will most likely just jump into Torment 1 (or higher) with their quality vanilla gear whereas brand new players will not be able to do that.

With monster HP’s in the old patch that was not entirely possible.

My biggest grip is the heavy RNG of crafting compared to the cost. Both re-rolling via the Horadric Cube, and crafting in Diablo 2 cost zero gold. The time cost of just gathering materials and the RNG were more than enough hurdles in that game. In diablo 3 we have comparatively stiff gold cost/gem cost now added on, and with everything BOA, its not clear why.

I don’t think any system that has that kind of cost in materials and time should follow so closely to what happens when a item drops from a monster.

My issue is this: if you’ve been grinding D3VANILLA for 2 since it’s glorious release, you should be on top by now AND the ‘expansion’ should be exactly that; an expansion. NOT a new game where all of your gains are rendered useless.

everyone i know has spent the past few months grinding paragon levels and streamlining their gear collection with “The promise of the mystic.”

To me, that promise, would allow me a nice edge I never had in D3V. As much as I played, I played legit and really had to grind for a decent item. I never owned a perfect trifecta and I was looking forward to making at least one ring, amulet with a decent roll. I was looking forward to finally have a Mempo with CC.

I’m unhappy with the decision to get rid of the AH, I don’t like that we can’t trade with our friends, and now on top of it all they’ve announced that legacy items wont be improvable via the mystic.

We should all be coming together to say F that. but, instead … the guy that’s supposed to rep us is writing articles about how much fun he’s having. Yeah, I like flux too … but, man … where is he when i need him?

He doesnt’ like barbs … OK … I get it … So, he wont have my back there either … but, now he’s just wusing out.

Why are you trying to get “on top” in what’s basically a non-competitive, mostly single-player game?

If you’ve been grinding since release, your rewards are: 1) Paragon points (lol); and 2) having characters at 60 so you can unlock Act 5 and the higher difficulty settings right away, and begin grinding them more easily.

There was absolutely nothing at any point that indicated that the expansion would do anything other than invalidate most old gear, because that’s how expansions to RPGs work. If new expansion gear didn’t invalidate old gear, why would you even buy the expansion? Why would you kill monsters to get gear that you didn’t even want, because it was worse than what you had?

I played entirely self-found and I don’t even really care that my items are going away, because who cares? I’ll get new items. So I’m not going to come together to complain about something I don’t care about. And yes, the guy that’s representing me is writing about having fun… because he’s HAVING FUN!

I just hear only whining from the things that ppl don’t want to play the game and just get items from friends and AH. Goddammit, just play the game, you will find the gear, you will love the gear. I played PTR from the very start and didn’t even bother to play Vanilla D3 anymore, because it’s just not interesting to play for AH.

I leveled up 5 character from 0 to 60 on this PTR and I loved every minute of it, and now after the latest patch, I just have to tell myself no to invest much time into this game, because the game will be released only after 1,5 months. This game is so much more fun now, even for those ppl, that will not buy the expansion and will be playing Diablo 3 Vanilla. All those new legendary fixes made this game very rewarding and much more fun to grind through the content.

If you want to be at the top with your gear and feel that your 2 years of “work” is worth something, than just don’t buy the expansion pack and play this game as it is now with a new patch that will be released in one month. Then you will still have the bragging rights for your awesome gear and so on. I bet that you are not playing many games if you feel so demoralized if the new content makes your gear not so good anymore, but that is the main thing if you really want to enjoy things, because you have to want to get new things, not just play the same gear through the new content for another 2-3 years. That’s just not good imho.

So, if you don’t like everything they do to this game – just quit. So simple.

What? Getting rid of the AH was the best decision they’ve ever made on diablo. Also, it is the age of Loot 2.0 because Loot 1.0 sucked majorly, adapt to the change and find new items. Isn’t that what diablo is about, instead of holding onto vanilla items and trying to enchant them?

Re: adastra. Well first of all, this was an article about the game changes in the new patch, not some overall item economy thing. I’ve written those previously, or talked about them on the podcast.

As for the no-legacy enchanting thing, others here in comments have pretty much summed up my feelings on the issue. I always expect RPG expansion packs to include big item inflation and make most/all vanilla gear obsolete, so it’s not really an issue to me. If it’s a talking point at all, it’s because Bliz has tried to keep RoS gear in the same ballpark with D3 gear, instead of just doubling everything, which forced them to implement the ham handed enchanting ban.

As others have said, players who want to keep using their BiS D3 gear can keep playing D3. RoS is a new game and I’m fine with it having new top end gear.

flux: the real issue isn’t that ros gear will be better than d3 gear (that’s a given) its that its not. and that they are instead choosing to cripple all the level 60 gear that drops. nothing in d3 will rival the old items when ROS items should just outright be better.

but instead nearly half of all affixes on items are wasted now. instead of the possibility of all 6 affixes being good I am forced to settle for half of them being trash, when I previously didn’t have too.

and to make that even better I can’t even GIVE away gear I don’t need and instead have to destroy it or waste it. in fact why am I forced to be online at all now if I can’t even trade, which was the beggest carrot-on-a-stick for diablo 2. they killed what kept diablo 2 alive.

after over a year of “I believe they’ll fix this game” now I just hope it burns and takes blizzard down with it. Kotick won, now I hope his kingdom crashes down on him.

All of the people in these forums love to point out that someone else is QQing. But, truth be told I don’t give a F. Someone has to say something now. now is the time.

thousands will buy the expansion kill a pack of monsters and get the weapon with `800 dps, 400 str, and a choice between a socket or 6% attack speed.

the next 4000 times they kill a monster it’ll be the same thing. Wash, rinse, dry and repeat. And it wont take long for people who have really played this game to say, “why, in so many ways, the downgrade?”

Flux you say – “As for the no-legacy enchanting thing, others here in comments have pretty much summed up my feelings on the issue. I always expect RPG expansion packs to include big item inflation and make most/all vanilla gear obsolete, so it’s not really an issue to me. If it’s a talking point at all, it’s because Bliz has tried to keep RoS gear in the same ballpark with D3 gear, instead of just doubling everything, which forced them to implement the ham handed enchanting ban.”

Every time an item drops and I see that, first off, it has less major attributes or affixes available than D3V … I’m disappointed; so will most people be. But, more so when I see the attack speed has been decreased. All of the new gear feels like a downgrade with a ‘boost’ to whatever main stat was available before.

Now, I can’t trade an item, I can’t use gold to trade for an item, I can’t upgrade items I’ve worked hard for. but, apparently you’ve barely noticed this. What would happen if you and your team were to actually write an article that went like this:

“worst decision ever made … blizzard sells us all down the river”

– then you campaigned for us to get, at the very least, a right to modify Vanilla items for a very high cost; 10m a pop.

I think you could pull it off. But, why don’t i see you trying? This is a big deal to tons of players; i’m not talking about all the people that want to kiss your buttox here in this thread. I’m talking about tons of people that play this game, that are very unhappy. Have you been reading the regular D3 forums?

no AH, no trading, nerfing attack speed, less main attributes on gear, no trading gold, now no mystic. I think I’ll just stay here in the bent over position and let everybody at blizz have a go at me.

I have upgraded my Skorn multiple times because it’s best in slot. I’ve had a Skorn on my WD for probably 90% of his lifetime. The last thing I want to do in RoS is enchant it so I can use it for another year.

Diablo is not about holding onto that trusty old baseball glove until it falls apart.. It’s always been about chasing that shiny new rare item. Every effort the devs have made, which Flux is detailing, has been to get people playing a new and improved Diablo 3. Finding items by playing the game.

The AH is gone, and now so are the items that everyone was FORCED to buy with gold or cash because of abysmal drop rates and underwhelming loot finds.

I don’t think it’s really a big deal. After all, you find Marquise like tribbles, and it’s only 200k to upgrade 3 of them to an Imperial. But I would like to see them drop a bit more often, just because the difficulty tooltip lists Imperial like it’s a real perk.

Awesome write-up Flux. I can only imagine how many hours you put into this.

I’d like to add two things.

1) It seems some of the crafted Legendaries now have unique affixes as well, although it’s possible that I just missed the ones that already had them. Just got the recipe for Cataclysm (level 52 two-handed mace) and it has this bonus: “[25-50]% chance to sunder the ground your enemies walk on when you attack.” It opens rifts in the ground, which I think is just a unique graphical effect, as it doesn’t seem to do any damage. Pretty cool anyway, although I hope the other crafted items will have more useful effects and not just Sets.

2) The new difficulty scaling is awesome. Now I can actually see myself playing on Torment 6 eventually. Generally enemy HP scaling is *much* less aggressive from the get go, but it really shows from Master and onward. The damage scaling for normal enemies has been increased however and they actually do damage to our characters now. Elites still do about as much damage as they did since the start of the PTR. All this means that characters who previously struggled with Torment 1-2 because of enemy HP are much more viable now at those difficulty levels.

I haven’t been following many details super close and reading the article made me confused about this “crafted Legendaries” business. Flux makes it sound like right now, crafted Legendaries are mostly working just like crafted rares. Is there a difference I’m missing?

Usually they are similar to Rares in that they don’t have unique affixes, but they always have higher stats for their level. Crafting the lower level ones doesn’t even require Legendary components. That changes at level 60 and 70, where you’ll need Brimstones and Forgotten Souls for crafting.

What HardRock said. Most of the crafted legs just say “6 random affixes,” but some do list 1 or more inherent properties, like that quiver plan I included. Note that crafted plans and crafting in general has been tweaked considerably in the last several patches, so I would expect more changes and improvements to come. And supposedly there are higher end and very rare crafting recipes that will do even more.

One of the things I’ve found with my playtime on my monk is items can drive what builds you try now. So as they drop you can experiment with different builds and play around with stuff you normally wouldn’t. I got the ring that has a 16% chance to stun on lightning damage attacks and switched to lightning based and used some saved light damage gear. Clan support really makes playing fun again whereas the old system you felt distant.

I even use a stormshield with over 500dex now over an offhand and my damage increased when a few defensive armor pieces were swapped with more offensive items. I have also played with the axe that converts thorns damage to weapon damage to some success.

I got that ring on my DH, but didn’t took that patch. It changed when I got Swamp Land Waders, adding +% poison damage. I swapped for this cool bolas (it’s green and it’s all over the screen, yay) and chakram (Serpentine is probably the best chakram rune, though I never used the skill, cause it’s, you know, chakram). That was really fun, as I never used this skills after getting to 60. Only if they made poison sentries…

In all seriousness I just checked. There is not a single white off hand white weapon (other than shields) on the AH at all and I’ve never seen one either. It’s fair to say they don’t exist and are minimum quality blue just like jewelry.

Well white items have zero utility in D3, so why would they be in the AH? I guess you could import some to PTR to try crafting? (But you’d overwrite your PTR chars if you imported again, thus losing the recipes you’d found to test them.)

All the legendary crafting recipes in RoS require the lvl 70 item types, so you have to find them fresh there. And it’s not too hard to find most armors; some levels have a lot of armor racks which mostly drop white items (Now; early in the beta they dropped more blue/yellow, and it was really hard to find the white base items needed for crafting.) Weapons are harder to assemble since there are more types of weapons, and you need the specific type for each recipe. Not just any old 1H sword, etc.

How can you not point out the fact that are punishing long time players of the game. That all that we've spent time building is lost in the new patch; rendered useless and now we can't modify a single thing?

Maybe because this is not a bad thing?
And expected for at least a few years anyway.

Good changes all around, still need to fix a few bugs, namely names/icons on the ground. The icons are helpful, but when you kill a goblin, everything drops on top of each other, and the icons don’t spread out, unlike the text. The text sucks b/c you can’t tell item types. Of course it’s kind of irrelevant, b/c you need to sell every single crap yellow just to break even if you try any crafting at all.

“The icons are helpful, but when you kill a goblin, everything drops on top of each other, and the icons don’t spread out, unlike the text.”

This does happen, but in my experience very rarely. I play only with the icons I don’t think I’ve seen this bug more than once or twice in 50+ hours of play time. I also think the icons are a straight up improvement over the text labels. Seeing item types at a glance is awesome.

Tested it last night. Every goblin and every gold chest/cursed chest had this problem. Regular elite monsters did not have this problem, nor did the Butcher (who dropped a grip of items w/ spread out icons! All of them blue…) But goblin poop is still in one tall, indecipherable pile, where you have to pick up white items to grab the gems underneath.

Interesting. I knew that drops are handled completely server-side, but it seems that even their positioning isn’t handled by our client. If it would be latency shouldn’t affect it. I do have a good connection, so I guess that could explain why this issue rarely crops up for me.

Playing tonight in a game with Holy Knight (I joined his game) and I saw almost all multi-drops stacked up like a roll of coins. That was drops from goblins and rift guardians; drops of 2 or 3 items from normal bosses were spread out properly. I’m using the icons/symbols for drops, not names. It’s not such a bad thing, and it’s kind of helpful since I can pick up the whole drop without moving the mouse a bit. Just click click click.

Weeks ago in the beta I saw this a lot with Gladiator Gauntlet gloves, which causes huge rains of gold whenever you got a killing spree. They would drop 20ish gold stacks (less in the current version) and often when someone else had the gloves I’d see just one solid heap of gold, with all the stacks direction on top of each other. (It almost always displayed fine when I was the one wearing the gloves.)

Thank you Flux! This is the first RoS article (since the the first few datamined releases) that has me really excited for the expansion! The vast number of legendary crafting materials looks really refreshing. More variety in the TYPEs of item drops, not just stats, was something I was really hoping for.

You ever notice that people only accuse Flux of being paid off by Blizzard when he makes a positive post (because D3 is the worst thing ever and playing it is like having your thumbs twisted off), but when he makes negative or iffy remarks no one ever accuses him of being paid off by GGG or something similar? What's the deal?
Also, I think Flux does a great job of representing me, even though I've never directly talked to him. I don't feel punished by an expansion coming out and Blizzard can do whatever they want to try and deliver an engaging expansion experience. If it looks like they're succeeding, I'll buy RoS; otherwise, I won't.

GGG doesn’t have those sorts of financial resources. They can’t even fix their server desync problems, something you haven’t seen since D1 (and then only because of peer to peer architecture).

That being said, I’m not blasting them that hard because unless Blizzard is themselves and nerfs fun these changes are actually good. Of course there’s a lot more they need to do and little time to do it in. When they do SOMETHING right, you stop roasting them. Easy to understand.

I’ll point out that since the patch, I’m finding a lot more no-name rares. No-name means push-to-show doesn’t work, but you can pick them up. And for more fun, you can drop them around town and confuse people.

Yeah, that one is the Bard, or something like that. Comes out up of the ground if you get near him. I’ve never been to that location in RoS. Come to think of it, I’ve never been to a lot of places in the game in RoS, since I’ve never done a full play through in Story Mode. Always go with Adventure Mode and bounties take you to most of the game, but some of those early Act One areas are not amongst them.

That might be changing, as more bounties are added. I got one in a cellar in Old Tristram and another on the road up there, right by the Whimsyshire entrance just yesterday, and I’d never seen either before.

“too many core flaws existed until friday, only for one patch to solve.”

If you feel that way about the game, then this patch won’t change your mind. However, if you already liked the direction things were going, but also noticed quite a details that didn’t fit, then this patch is simply amazing.

You ever notice that people only accuse Flux of being paid off by Blizzard when he makes a positive post (because D3 is the worst thing ever and playing it is like having your thumbs twisted off), but when he makes negative or iffy remarks no one ever accuses him of being paid off by GGG or something similar? What's the deal?

well, when he makes a negative remark. some people just call him a garden variety hater instead of a paid hater. flux can't win, but at least he doesn't cry in his baby formula about it like josh.

The AH is gone, and now so are the items that everyone was FORCED to buy with gold or cash because of abysmal drop rates and underwhelming loot finds.

lulz..funny, the tune almost two years ago was," don't like AH, don't use it" or "AH is ok. blizz needs to pay for servers or they might go broke". apparently, the tune has changed to "we were forced to use AH".

lulz..funny, the tune almost two years ago was," don't like AH, don't use it" or "AH is ok. blizz needs to pay for servers or they might go broke". apparently, the tune has changed to "we were forced to use AH".

Uh, no, the tune became “The AH is ruining the item game” almost immediately after release. It was constantly harped on by all sides all the time.

Really nice effort, Flux. I was never really on the fence on buying ROS, but I see many are, and this article should really help. Of course, Blizz are entitled to fuckup their game before release, but I hope Mr. Mascara, Mosquito, whatever steers the ship in the right direction.

lulz..funny, the tune almost two years ago was," don't like AH, don't use it" or "AH is ok. blizz needs to pay for servers or they might go broke". apparently, the tune has changed to "we were forced to use AH".

Some people still use the “dont like X, dont use X” argument :/
I wonder if it will ever stop.

Not entirely related to just this patch but also the previous X months I was wondering how followers have changed.

I directly asume hardly any at all (if not please seperate update, unless that already has happened) but just wondering since I always loved them in Diablo 2 and eventhoug the skillsystem and such for Diablo 3 is cooler they always felt less impressive.

The 1/5 damage penalty has been removed, I think the skills have had a few buffs here and there, and there are two legendary items for each follower (one stops them dying, the other gives them access to all skills at once).

A couple of other legs interact with them. There’s one that periodically summons all three to fight with you for a short time, and another, the Unity ring, which causes all damage taken to be split among all characters wearing it, including followers.

The 1/5 damage penalty has been removed, I think the skills have had a few buffs here and there, and there are two legendary items for each follower (one stops them dying, the other gives them access to all skills at once).
A couple of other legs interact with them. There's one that periodically summons all three to fight with you for a short time, and another, the Unity ring, which causes all damage taken to be split among all characters wearing it, including followers.
But there are no new skills or item slots.

Fair enough, more then I expected. I’ll have to look into the skillbufs (prob minor but still), legendaries will come later.

Removing that ridiculous 1/5 damage penalty makes companions a much better leveling companion than they were before. I can’t love that change enough. Smart-loot crafted companion-only items also give them a huge boost.

I just wish I was allowed to set the crafters to a “craft for my follower” mode. If you want to craft weapons for your companion who uses a different stat, you are pretty much forced to do it on a different character. I’ve just been using the followers that match my primary stat on each character to avoid all the hassle, but it feels like it’s cutting down my options (even if it is just my laziness that’s doing it).

Well white items have zero utility in D3, so why would they be in the AH? I guess you could import some to PTR to try crafting? (But you'd overwrite your PTR chars if you imported again, thus losing the recipes you'd found to test them.)
All the legendary crafting recipes in RoS require the lvl 70 item types, so you have to find them fresh there. And it's not too hard to find most armors; some levels have a lot of armor racks which mostly drop white items (Now; early in the beta they dropped more blue/yellow, and it was really hard to find the white base items needed for crafting.) Weapons are harder to assemble since there are more types of weapons, and you need the specific type for each recipe. Not just any old 1H sword, etc.

They had shields. Not many, but some. Those also drop in game, same with weapons and armor. You said it yourself – you never, even once saw a white offhand other than shields. If you haven’t, and I haven’t, and the AH (collectively – many players) hasn’t, it’s most likely that such an item cannot drop and the minimum quality is magic.

Given this has been “bug reported several times already” others are noticing this as well.

I have played the new patch on the PTR for a couple of days, and it has been great fun. Like it’s been said, leveling is much smoother, lots of small additions and changes that makes the game so much more enjoyable than before.

I was surprised to see the many set plan drops, and have been crafting a few set items, in particular the Sage’s set.

And while some of the items, I have crafted have decent stats, though not exactly upgrades to my current gear, more like side-grades, I noticed that the bonus on the Sage’s set for wearing 2 set items is a measly 35 main stat. Compare that to the 200+ main-stat I get for crafting these items at level 60, and 35 seems like a paltry and not very worthy bonus to receive.

I am aware that other sets might yield higher and better bonuses for equipping partial or complete sets, but I still feel that Blizzard needs to revise some of the sets, crafted or found to ensure that the bonuses you get are worth it. I don’t want the sets to always trump legendary, but the bonuses should be high enough, or interesting enough at least, for you to consider making a (partial) set instead or just wearing single set pieces that individually rival one of your legs. Otherwise, a set is just legendary with a different color.

Don’t know if anyone has reported this yet, but the XP bonus from Pools of Reflection stay around between games. I got one, logged out, and then in again, and I still had the bonus when I re-entered game. Just a nice thing to note.

Don't know if anyone has reported this yet, but the XP bonus from Pools of Reflection stay around between games. I got one, logged out, and then in again, and I still had the bonus when I re-entered game. Just a nice thing to note.

Well, it should not be a pool in the first place. Finding survival bonus is pretty dumb, shouldn't it come from surviving?
But survival bonus in itself should not be what is exciting. Survival should.

This is why, inherently, an endless dungeon would be better than what they’ve created (Rifts+Bounties). The thing with rifts+bounties is that they’re nice and all, but they’re not really a self-contained “mode” with any real risk/reward, because there’s pretty much no risk unless you’re playing HC, and even then, the risk is from randomness.

If there were an endless dungeon mode, they could have it have massive boosts to MF (better loot), but make it so if you die X times, you get kicked out with no loot retained. (And no TP, etc.) So every level, you have to choose whether to head back to town with the loot you’ve gotten so far, or push your luck further down, with each level increasing in difficulty and reward. Then you add in the Rift bosses they’ve designed, put some special twists on Act bosses at random points within the endless dungeon, and now you have a roguelike mode within your ARPG, which is neat.

Imperial is a lie
Not true! I found some imperials gems now, there are rare, but not extremly rare. I found them rather on Torment III-IV.

“I think it would be more fun if there were ultra-rare orange PoRs that granted Magic Find or Gold Find bonus as well, or perhaps when you got more than 5 stacks you’d start to get a GF/MF bonus on top of the EXP?”

there are legendaries that uses survival bonus. For example, your life is restored to full, when you gain survival bonus. Nice, is’nt it?

Well, it should not be a pool in the first place. Finding survival bonus is pretty dumb, shouldn't it come from surviving?But survival bonus in itself should not be what is exciting. Survival should.

i agree, but you know that is verboten in a blizz game where everybody gets a trophy, an orange slice and a pat on the back just for showing up.

If there were an endless dungeon mode, they could have it have massive boosts to MF (better loot), but make it so if you die X times, you get kicked out with no loot retained. (And no TP, etc.) So every level, you have to choose whether to head back to town with the loot you've gotten so far, or push your luck further down, with each level increasing in difficulty and reward.

good idea, ivan. well, up until the point where you mention the words choice, risk and failure but keep working on it. you're getting close.

i agree, but you know that is verboten in a blizz game where everybody gets a trophy, an orange slice and a pat on the back just for showing up.
good idea, ivan. well, up until the point where you mention the words choice, risk and failure but keep working on it. you're getting close.

Hey man, just because it’s not going to happen doesn’t mean I can’t want it to happen.

Reaper of Souls is liked by some and not so much by others. Trade is totally gone except for if a guy is right there with you when you find something and you want to trade right now. Most Characters are nerfed to make it more difficult.

Character development is the worst offender. Literally, your pants do more damage than your character on the highest level in the game. So a broken system. $40 – pass on it unless you just like buying stuff.